LOCATION

George Washington University School of Business
Duques Hall, Room 652
2201 G Street NW (main entrance on 22nd Street between G and H Streets)
Metro: Foggy Bottom Station

Bio: John Shoven

John B. Shoven is the Trione Director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics at Stanford. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He specializes in public finance and corporate finance and has published on Social Security, health economics, corporate and personal taxation, mutual funds, pension plans, economic demography and applied general equilibrium economics. His books include The Real Deal: The History and Future of Social Security, Yale University Press, 1999, and The Evolving Pension System, Brookings Institution Press, 2005. His most recent book is co-authored with former Secretary of State and the Treasury George Shultz and deals with both Social Security and health care reform in the U.S. (Putting Our House in Order: A Guide to Social Security and Health Care Reform, W.W. Norton, 2008). He also recently published a research paper on new ways of measuring age (“New Age Thinking: Alternative Ways of Measuring Age, Their Relationship to Labor Force Participation, Government Policies and GDP,” NBER Working Paper No. 13476. October 2007). His journal publications appear in such places as the American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Perspectives, and the Journal of Public Economics. In total, he has published more than one hundred professional articles and twenty books.

Professor Shoven is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a recipient of the Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security, and an award winning teacher at Stanford. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in 1973 and has been associated with Stanford ever since. He was Dean of Humanities and Sciences from 1993 to 1998. He is Chairman of the Board of Board of Cadence Design Systems and serves on the boards of American Century Funds, Exponent, Inc., and Financial Engines, Inc.

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Abstract

Trying the Impossible—Financing 30-Year retirements with 40-Year Careers: A Discussion of Social Security and Retirement Policy by John B. Shoven.

This talk will take two parts. The first part will deal with the need to adjust retirement institutions for longer lifetimes. The talk will first document how much the length of remaining life has increased for 65-year-olds over the past sixty years. I will then briefly discuss several policy changes that seem promising in encouraging people to work longer. The nature of these policy changes is to remove the current hidden early retirement incentives in existing programs. The second part of the talk has the separate title, Efficient Retirement Design: Combining Private Assets and Social Security to Maximize Retirement Resources. Here I develop the idea of using 401(k) assets and other private assets to finance a deferral of Social Security rather than to finance a supplement to Social Security. The return to Social Security deferral is an outlier in today’s financial markets. This redesign in the use of private defined contribution assets has the potential to add between $100,000 to $200,000 to lifetime consumption relative to using the assets to buy a conventional annuity.

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